Robert Olen Butler is a restless writer. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” he presented the Vietnam War through the voices of Vietnamese emigrants living in Louisiana. In his novels “They Whisper” and “The Deep Green Sea,” he delved into sensual Vietnam memories from an American military man’s point of view.

Some of his fiction delights in constraints; one extreme case is the collection “Severance,” which toys with the idea that, after decapitation, the human mind has about 90 seconds of consciousness left to it. Butler figured that meant 240 words’ worth, and compiled 62 stories at exactly that length.

His new novel, however, plays it straight. Though compact, the book ­ranges widely in time and setting to trace the effects of war — primarily the Vietnam conflict — on several generations of a New Orleans family. Butler’s Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. “Perfume River” hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity.

It tells the story of the Quinlan brothers: the 70-year-old Florida State University history professor Robert, who tried to please his World War II veteran father, William, by enlisting in the Army in 1967 and going to Vietnam; and the 68-year-old Jimmy, who, reviling the war and falling out violently with his dad, headed to Canada to live his life on his own terms.

Close to 50 years later, in 2015, William is on his death bed and the estrangements in the family are tested. Can Jimmy, who has stayed incommunicado all these years, really keep away? Are there any filial connections left to work with?

The novel’s title refers to the river in Hue where Robert was pulled into pleasures and perils he has never shared with anyone. But the book has as much to do with feeling too damn old to deal with your problematic elderly parents as it does with specific Vietnam legacies.

The brothers’ Irish Catholic mother, Peggy — always needy, and now legitimately overwrought by her husband’s crisis — is as much of a handful as their cantankerous father. In Butler’s sly portrayal, Peggy’s manipulative insistence on her woes leaves her blind to how she strikes others.

Of course, a family in its later stages also includes the spouses and offspring of its grown children. Butler’s particulars on the two brothers’ marriages are comprehensively adroit. Robert and his wife, Darla, a fellow academic, are anchored in an almost-too-quiet routine; their careful consideration for each other has raised a barrier between them. Jimmy and his wife, with their discreetly open marriage, face different challenges. A central factor in the book is the presence of a homeless man, Bob, who becomes a menacing mirror to Robert after being bought a meal by him.

Butler’s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don’t extend just to his characters’ traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he’s addressing. (The late 1960s, in Jimmy’s recollection, were “an era of militant gentleness, judgmental tolerance.”) Truth-telling designed to devastate and secrets that, if revealed, might destroy one relationship, even as they clear the air for another, are all in complex play here.

“You share a war in one way,” Robert thinks. “You pass it on in another.”

“Perfume River” captures both the agony and subtlety of how that happens.

Michael Upchurch, the author of “Passive Intruder” and other novels, was the staff book critic for The Seattle Times from 1998 to 2008.